A Miami man,
Harrison Garcia, 27, believed to have supplied painkiller-spiked soda drinks to
Lil' Wayne, Chris Brown and other Hip Hop artists has been sentenced
to 30
years in prison.
A federal
judge sentenced Garcia, also known as Cuban Harry, to prison after jurors
convicted him of armed drug trafficking in April.
U.S. Judge
Patricia Seitz said Garcia's crimes were serious against the backdrop of a
national drug epidemic that "dehumanizes and enslaves" addicts.
She said:
"It is the kind of conduct that is very much a scourge on our
community".
Garcia was
sentenced on Friday in a federal court.
After Garcia
was sentenced, he said.
"I want
to briefly apologize to my parents and your honor". "Hopefully, I
learn from this."
Garcia was
believed by the feds to have supplied South Florida's hip-hop scene with the
potent drink known as "lean" while jet setting around the world with
singer Chris Brown and shooting rap videos with Lil' Wayne.
Federal
agents say Garcia was a big supplier of "lean," or
"sizzurp," a powerful brew of soda and prescription-strength syrup of
promethazine with codeine.
Different
types of the "lean" drink have been popular in the hip-hop industry
and songs over the past decade, with rappers such as Lil' Wayne, Young Thug and
Future dropping odes to the concoction.
They are
also always seen sipping from white styrofoam cups or others types of cups
while they shoot their music videos, travel, perform on stage or just walk on
the streets.
Garcia's
Instagram page - which has over 30,000 followers - showed off a rap-video lifestyle;
he proudly showed off gold chains and wads of cash, jewel-encrusted teeth and
many tattoos, including one of the fictional drug kingpin Scarface wielding an
assault rifle.
He was never
subtle about his love of lean. He called himself "Muhammad_a_Lean"
and the "CEO of Purple Drank,".
He has a
diamond-encrusted pendant of a styrofoam cup and posted many photos of soda and
cough syrup on IG page.
Garcia
insisted he was nothing more than a junkie, not a dealer, who tried to play the
part of dope peddler on social media to build street cred for his hip-hop
career. "I had an image to portray, to boost up my followers," Garcia
testified at a pre-trial hearing in January. "I guess it's just the music
industry."
Over four
days of testimony at his April trial, jurors heard that Garcia admitted he sold
"large amounts of narcotics" to rapper Lil Wayne, and received a
$15,000 payment from singer Chris Brown for drugs, including lean.
Jurors
viewed undercover videos of two drug deals Garcia allegedly completed with two
confidential informants posing as buyers. They also saw a slew of Instagram
photos of Garcia showing off an arsenal of guns, five of which were seized by
U.S. Homeland Security Investigation agents.
Garcia is
also facing state racketeering charges in Broward, where authorities say he
paid a crew of young men to bust into dozens of Walgreens and CVS stores to
steal the pricey bottles of promethazine with codeine syrup.
His lawyer
in the federal case, Gus Lage, said his team will appeal the sentence.
"Given
that Harrison went to trial, refused to cooperate and that draconian minimum
mandatory sentences exist which made 30 years and one day the lowest sentence
that could be imposed under the circumstances, we were pleased that the court
and the government agreed to the imposition of the lowest sentence
available," Lage said.
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